The High Road (2 page)

I propped myself up on my pillows, taking care not to shake the bed unduly, and opened the
Globe
. Four photos accompanied the story. There was a shot of Professor Angus McLintock receiving a teaching award from the U of O Engineering Society. Another showed him sitting in
Baddeck 1
, the hovercraft he’d designed and built in the boathouse workshop below me. Yet another photo, taken just outside the House of Commons, featured Angus flanked by yours truly and Muriel Parkinson, whose smile actually made her look younger than her eighty-one years. Finally, there was a stock photo of disgraced former Finance Minister and Cumberland-Prescott M P, the Honourable Eric Cameron, likely taken after presenting his last federal budget and well before the cataclysm of a couple of months ago.

Lindsay stirred beside me, then was still again.

It was surreal to see my own name in a
Globe and Mail
headline.

M
C
L
INTOCK AND
A
DDISON
– C
UTTING A NEW PATH IN POLITICS

It was a bit over the top in my view. Then there was the subhead to fill in the holes in the headline.

B
EHIND THE PARTNERSHIP THAT BROUGHT DOWN A GOVERNMENT

Please. It made us sound so much more purposeful and calculating than we had actually been. Really, I’d had very little to
do with it all. The Tories had gambled that the snowstorm of the decade would maroon most MPs in their ridings. It was Angus who had rocketed up the frozen Ottawa River in
Baddeck 1
all the way to Parliament Hill. I was just a spectator in the gallery when he burst onto the floor of the House, his wild grey hair and swirling beard in full fright, just in time to cast the deciding vote. But like the intoxicating aroma that often leads me three blocks out of my way to the nearest Cinnabon outlet, the headline and subhead are intended to seize your attention.

I settled in to read the piece. Lindsay still looked as if she were asleep beside me but her roving hands beneath the comforter told a different story. Focus, Daniel, focus. André’s story covered the whirlwind of the last two and a half months, including my abrupt resignation from my speech-writing gig in the Liberal Leader’s office and my guilt-driven promise on my way out to find a Liberal candidate to run in my new home riding of Cumberland-Prescott. Never mind that it was the safest Conservative seat in the land.

As I feared, André revealed the bargain I had struck with my new landlord, Angus McLintock. I’d admitted nothing in my interview, but honest Angus had freely confessed he agreed to let his name stand as the no-hope Liberal sacrificial lamb only after I promised to teach his English for Engineers class, a quadrennial duty he absolutely loathed. I was surprised to see that André had included a nice quotation from my PhD thesis supervisor noting how pleased he was that I’d agreed to join the English faculty at Ottawa U.

Lindsay’s sub-sheet ministrations moved quickly from distracting to arousing, but I had almost finished the story. The hint of a smile on her tranquil face confirmed that she was not in the throes of some strange, yet wholly satisfying, sleep disorder.

“Just a couple more paragraphs, Linds, and I’m all yours. I’m just getting to the good part.”

“Me too,” she whispered, still smiling.

She redoubled her efforts as if I’d said nothing at all, which,
frankly, worked out pretty well for me.

André had some fun with the leather-studded late-campaign stunner, describing how the wildly popular incumbent MP and Finance Minister Eric Cameron inadvertently went public with his S&M secret. You don’t often see words like “alligator clip” and “crotchless rubber suit” living in the same sentence alongside “Finance Minister.” So I savoured the moment. Even Muriel made it into the article. André described her as the spirited eighty-something Liberal warhorse who had stood for the Liberals against the Tory tide in C-P for five elections in a row. Nicely put. I wondered how Lindsay’s grandmother would take the “warhorse” reference, before deciding she’d probably wear it with pride.

By this time, Lindsay had shed any pretence of sleep and thrown herself into her work. She was quite good at it, too. My concentration flagged as I tried to make it to the end of the article while also thinking hard about baseball. And hockey, and football. Did I mention baseball? Almost there. Just a few more paragraphs. Bear down, Daniel. Down.

The article couldn’t quite capture the full impact of Angus McLintock’s stunning upset and his honest, forthright, and refreshing approach to public service. Yet it was all true. Against all odds, against more than a century of local political tradition, and definitely against the wishes of Angus McLintock, it was all true. Despite outward appearances of a carefully orchestrated grand plan, we’d simply been lurching from one issue to the next, trying to do the right thing. Who could have foreseen Angus McLintock’s Midas touch? I certainly hadn’t.

The last line of the feature really said it all.

“No and no,” I intoned out of nowhere, in a louder voice than I’d intended.

Lindsay clearly wasn’t taking no for an answer, and launched into new techniques well beyond my thin playbook. I do have my limits. I jettisoned the paper as if it were on fire.

An hour later, when we’d both finished, the
Globe
story I mean, Lindsay set down the paper.

“Well? Did André nail it?” she asked.

“He got the history right, but he’s got the future all wrong,” I replied. “As far as I’m concerned, Angus and I are heading back to the peace and quiet of the university. He didn’t want to win. I didn’t want him to win. The collapse of the government just means we can now go back to our regularly scheduled lives.”

Lindsay smiled and looked down. I thought I might even have detected a faint shake of her head.

“I’m with Grandma. I think Angus was surprised to discover that he actually liked being an M P. And I think you actually quite liked being his EA.”

“Despite what Muriel and you believe, I think I know Angus pretty well. He will not run again,” I concluded. “You can flip us both over and grab the barbecue sauce, we’re done.”

We lay in peace for a time.

“What a wonderful few weeks it’s been,” Lindsay sighed and rested her head on my chest. No one before her had ever rested her head on my chest. I liked it.

December had certainly packed a punch, and I don’t just mean weather-wise. When the government collapsed, we found ourselves with some time on our hands as the Governor General tried to figure out what to do. The government fell, but it didn’t automatically mean another election would immediately be called. The GG had another option to consider, particularly since Canadians had endured an election just over two months ago. She could ask the Liberals to try to form a government with the support of the New Democratic Party. But that would be like
asking the Hatfields and the McCoys to make nice and move in together. Not bloody likely, but worth a try. Neither party had the seats to survive without the support of the other. So our fearless leader sat down with the NDP Leader and for the last two weeks, they’d been trading horses, trading insults, and nearly trading blows.

Twice the discussions broke down. The first time, the NDP Leader stomped away from the table when our guy refused even to consider a thirty-year-old NDP plank, nationalizing the banking system. It was a non-starter. To get him back to the table, we apparently offered a compromise, agreeing that a Liberal government would strengthen the regulatory powers of the long-neutered Foreign Investment Review Agency. Then three days ago, our enraged leader was said to have thrown an eraser at his NDP counterpart. I’ve seen the Liberal leader in the heat of a temper tantrum. I’m glad only an eraser had been in reach and not a stapler, let alone a fax machine. It all fell apart over the demand that at least a couple of NDP MPs sit in the proposed Liberal Cabinet. I could understand why the NDP would expect a seat or two at the Cabinet table if they were going to prop up a Liberal government. Unfortunately, I was not invited to the negotiations. Bradley Stanton was running the show. Bradley wouldn’t recognize a principle if one landed squarely on his crotch. As for the NDP’s Cabinet demand, our leader exhausted all the appropriate clichés (
over my dead body
,
when hell freezes over
, etc., etc.) and reached for the eraser. After bouncing it off the NDP Leader’s forehead, he found there really wasn’t much left to talk about. The two negotiating teams gathered up their toys and headed home. It was Christmas Eve by then, yet neither leader was in the gift-giving mood. The Governor General was expected to announce her decision on how to proceed on December 27, giving the political parties, and the nation for that matter, a brief Christmas reprieve from the political manoeuvring.

While much of that was playing out, Lindsay and I had escaped to Quebec City for a four-day break. If you’re with the right
person, at the right moment in a romance, nothing deepens a relationship like four days strolling through the snow-filled streets of old Quebec. I swear I did not think for even one moment of the political maelstrom we had helped to create and that was now presumably raging in the nation’s capital. I couldn’t. Lindsay and I connected on a whole new level while in that beautiful city. Without romanticizing it too much, it seemed more a meeting of minds and hearts than anything else, although deep and long discussions were punctuated by the breathless meeting of more tangible parts. When we returned to Cumberland, Lindsay promptly moved into the boathouse with me. It was the most wonderful Christmas gift I’d ever received.

Angus had spent his holiday break in the workshop putting the finishing touches on
Baddeck 1
, the now famous homemade hovercraft that had brought down a government. I’d seen very little of him since Lindsay and I had returned, but as I climbed the outside stairs to the apartment above, I spied through the workshop window that the hovercraft was finally varnished so the blue paint gleamed.

Yesterday had been wonderful. Christmas morning always has a special feel to it. The streets had been deserted as Lindsay and I drove to pick up Muriel, before returning to open gifts and wade through the turkey fumes at the McLintock house. Pete1 and Pete2, two pierced and tattooed punk rocker engineering students, and our only campaign volunteers, made a brief appearance, on leave from their own family celebrations in Cumberland. In true Christmas spirit, Pete1 had attached a jingle bell to one of his cheek piercings while Pete2 had reinforced his red and green frosted mohawk with enough mega-hold gel to support a small sprig of mistletoe that hung perfectly above and in front of his forehead. Nice.

Angus did not once raise politics but outdid himself as merry host. Well, as merry as a crusty Scot can be. He fussed over Muriel as never before and made sure she was settled in a comfortable
chair before he passed out the gifts arranged under the tree in the window. It helped that he bears a striking resemblance to Santa Claus in street clothes, although I doubt Santa carried sawdust and sandwich crumbs in his beard, let alone spoke through such a thick Scottish accent.

Angus clearly took delight in giving gifts, despite his curmudgeonly demeanour. He’d obviously given heartfelt thought to each of the gifts he presented. To Muriel, he gave the final typewritten manuscript of his late wife’s last book. Muriel had been a great admirer of Marin Lee’s writing, long before she knew Angus had been her husband. She was moved to glistening eyes by the gesture. On almost every page, there were notes in Marin’s own hand in the margins. Angus had built and varnished an ornate maple box, with a lid and latch that housed the manuscript perfectly.

For the two Petes, Angus had somehow secured two official lapel pins of the mace of Canada’s Parliament that must be worn by MPs to allow them access to the House of Commons. I have no idea how he’d gotten his hands on two extras. Using his soldering skills, Angus had fashioned each mace pin into what looked like a big safety pin so they could be worn as body piercings for special occasions. Angus warned them not to show up on Parliament Hill wearing them or the Commissionaires might seize their pins and “escort” them off the premises.

When Lindsay opened the very old Walter Duff sketch of the Canadian Senate Angus had found for her, she just shook her head in surprise and locked him in a bear hug. Lindsay was doing her Master’s in political science and her thesis was on the future of the Senate. She was bucking the prevailing wisdom and felt strongly that the Senate could actually become the chamber of second sober thought that it was originally envisaged to be. The sketch was a beautiful piece of art in a simple and classy black frame. She was touched.

As for me, I unwrapped a mint-condition, signed first edition of Robertson Davies’s novel
Leaven of Malice
, the only one of his
great works to have won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. I have no idea how Angus had known, but this was the only Davies novel I didn’t own in a first edition.

I don’t know who was more pleased, all of us who had just opened absolutely perfectly chosen gifts or Angus himself, as our unalloyed pleasure washed over him.

Having passed all the gifts under the tree to us, Angus eventually got around to opening my gift to him. He looked at it for such a long time I began to worry. Then he raised his eyes to mine and mouthed, “I thank you.” No sound came with his words.

It was a framed photograph taken at Baddeck in Cape Breton in 1918. In the foreground, a dock juts into Baddeck Bay. Dominating the right-hand side of the photograph, Alexander Graham Bell stands with his back to the camera. He cuts a fine figure in tweed knickers and a poor-boy cap. He gazes out towards the bay watching as his hydrofoil, the
HD-4
, races above the waves on its ladder blades towards the world water speed record it would own for more than a decade. Later that night as I sat at my – rather our – kitchen table in the dark counting my blessings, I saw Angus trudging through the snow towards the boathouse, the Bell photo under his arm. Fifteen minutes after he’d entered the workshop below, I heard five faint hammer blows as a finishing nail was driven into the wooden wall so Bell could watch not only his beloved
HD-4
, but also stand guard over
Baddeck 1
.